WoW held up StarCraft II for a year

Blizzard boss Rob Pardo’s told EG that work on World of Warcraft is to blame for the fact StarCraft II’s taken so long to finish.

StarCraft II dev started in 2003, but Blizzard didn’t even announce the game until 2007. Apparently Blizzard’s had a playable version of the game since late 2005.

“One of the reasons that StarCraft II had some delays very early on in development is because a fair amount of the design team went onto World of Warcraft for a year to really help finish that game off,” Pardo said.

“They had a lot of really great experience to bring, with their knowledge of how they approached the map editor problems, how they dealt with balancing – which we could then leverage into class balancing.”